Dystopian Reality, Utopian Thought

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Dystopian Reality, Utopian Thought and Educational

Practice

Marianna Papastephanou

Published online: 8 January 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

Abstract The significance of utopian thought for education can be made evident through

reconceptualizing utopia and approaching it alongside the notion of dystopia. Awareness of

dystopian elements of reality radicalizes the kind of critique that assists utopian thought

and makes engagement with it more pressing. Awareness of the lurking danger of future

dystopia goes hand in hand with a utopia that is cautious and vigilant of its own possible

turn into catastrophe. If education is not just an institution of the unreflective socialization

and social integration of the young immersed in technicist and prudentialist goals, if it isabout futurity and vision of a better world, it has to rely on, and renegotiate, utopian

thought. Yet, all this presupposes a new descriptive account of the self and the world that

breaks with the kind of anthropology and ethics that generated a particular conception of

utopia as impossible and purely oneiric.

Keywords Hope Happiness Ethics Anti-utopia 2000 curriculum

Calvino Mamet Hesse

Introduction

Educational practice has improved: it is more progressive than authoritarian and elitist,

more democratic and open to the masses and surely more multivocal and sensitive to the

historical context than ever. Yet, it seems that precisely its de-distantiation (Mannheim), its

proximity to the needs of everyday life and its sensitivity to context have brought edu-

cational practice closer to purposes set by the market (Young 2003) that are extrinsic to the

educational ideal of human perfectibility. Lacking critical self-distance and often theorized

through a disillusioned post-metaphysical perspective, educational practice appears

insouciant. It indulges in the thought that it does its best, that, ultimately, our world is thebest possible and that any utopian attempt to change it for the better will end in disaster. In

so doing it ignores and simultaneously fuels the dystopian elements of the present

Stud Philos Educ (2008) 27:89102

DOI 10.1007/s11217-007-9092-9
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Without underestimating the qualities of our world and its educational achievements, I

argue that the dystopian element in educational life must be acknowledged not so as to

promote cynicism and resignation but so as to motivate desire for more radical reorien-

tation. To illustrate the diagnostic character of such an acknowledgement, I read David

Mamets play Oleanna as an educational dystopia and, to depict the specific relation ofdystopian reality and utopian imagination that I propose, I refer to Hermann Hesses short

story Strange News from Another Star. However, these steps presuppose a philosophical

reworking of the notions of utopian thought and dystopian reality that I attempt elsewhere

but, for reasons of space, I cannot fully deploy here. Thus, I begin with this reworking as it

can be conveyed through the last pages of Calvinos Invisible Cities. My strategy in this

article is not so much to thread my way through detailed argumentation but to weave

associations of utopia, dystopia and education as they emerge from various texts, the

suggestiveness of which compensates, I hope, for the unavoidably limited deployment of

the relevant argumentative material.

Preliminary Remarks

Various conceptual contents of utopia and dystopia are encountered in most cultures

(Kumar 2003) from antiquity to the present and they have, for that reason, justifiably been

recounted in almost all the recent texts in the relevant literature. Still, whereas in early

modernity the notion of utopia was embraced and projected on a temporal dimension of

fulfillment that radicalized its initial spatial and novelist character (Habermas 1994), later it

fell upon hard times. The reasons

1

for this are well known and productive of very stronganti-utopian theoretical positions. The most famous exceptions in the 20th century have

been the works of Ernst Bloch (1986) and Karl Mannheim (1960) but, despite their

influence, those works have not turned into a dominant current of thought. Conservative

and Cold War liberal attacks on the dangerous ambitions of utopianism assisted by the

downfall of revolutionary confidence have led to a full-scale retreat from visions of

perfection (Geoghegan 2003, p. 156). The right-wing undertone, as Jameson explains, is

that the system (now grasped as the free market) is part of human nature; that any attempt

to change it will be accompanied by violence; and that efforts to maintain the changes

(against human nature) will require dictatorship (Jameson 2004, p. 35).

But many left-wing thinkers have also maintained a negative or an ambivalent stancetoward utopia, often echoing Marxs unease or downright rejection of the idea. This holds

as much for Laclau and Mouffe (Brockelman 2003; Cooke 2004) as it does for Zizek,

despite the fact that their anti-utopianism is fundamentally different from the one that

recruits the threat of totalitarianism (Brockelman 2003, p. 198).2 The incredulity regarding

utopia that has been brewing for some time now in postmodern thought is evident in

Derridas following assertion.

1 Utopia is treated with suspicion as impossible in principle and thus potentially dangerous and totalitarian

in practice (Levitas 2004a, p. 605). Isaiah Berlin (his book The Crooked Timber of Humanity is very telling)

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Although there is a critical potential in utopia which one should no doubt never

completely renounce, above all when one can turn it into a motif of resistance against

all alibis and all realist and pragmatist resignations, I still mistrust the word. In

certain contexts, utopia, the word in any case, is all too easily associated with the

dream, with demobilisation, with an impossibility that urges renouncement instead ofaction (Derrida 2000, p. 8).3

Education as theory and practice could very well answer Derridas concerns. Theory

aspires to formulate an appropriate regulative ideal; practice aspires to approximate it, but,

more than that, practice raises a demand for here and now that prevents the degeneration

of the ideal into an ever receding futurism. It also provides means for critiquing and

modifying the ideal through the scrutiny that actuality invigorates and recharges. Besides,

utopia and education have a common denominator: the former presupposes the plasticity of

humanity, the latter constantly moulds and remoulds it. However, the anti-utopian loss of

faith in human malleability has pervaded education too,4

thus having a share in the edu-cational failure to meet the task of forging a better humanity. The oscillation between

positive and negative treatments of utopia marked the modernist conception of education

as a project for future betterment of humanitywith the negative stance toward utopia

increasingly gaining a sweeping force. Given that education has played an important role

in many utopian projects or novels (Peters and Humes 2003, p. 429), it is ironic that utopia

has fallen into educational disrepute. What is alarming, though, is the political quietism

that results from the fact that philosophy of education loses much critical force when it

gives in so light-heartedly to anti-utopian trends.

Yet the interest in utopia is now being renewed both in general philosophy5 and in

philosophy of education (Halpin 2001a, p. 300) through a series of books, special issuesand conferences on utopian imagination. The educational comeback of utopia can be found

in three trends: (a) the educational critical response to Futures Studies (Peters and Humes

2003); (b) the radical transformation approach to education (which preserved the utopian

element all along from Freire down to Giroux and McLaren); and (c) the reformist

approach to educational practice from Dewey down to recent thinkers (Halpin 2001a;

Demetrion 2001) favouring piecemeal pragmatist utopian change.

Despite their being valuable and very welcome in their capacity to invigorate philo-

sophical dialogue and reorient education to more critical and futurity-inspired aims,

educational approaches to futurity often succumb to systemic imperatives. In Peters andHumes words, now that the question of futures is subjected to its own disciplinary

formation and methodologies, educational futures tend to be more mundane and technical,

or both, especially when they are harnessed as official policy narratives (2003, p. 431). Or,

most of the attempts to retrieve utopia lack the comprehensiveness that is necessary if the

old, faulty lines are to be avoided. For instance, in much of the relevant material, utopia is

more historically mapped rather than revisited through the prism of contemporary

3 This Derridean idea suffers from genetic fallacy but this argument cannot be developed here for reasons of

space.4 Adorno criticizes this as follows. Not only does society, as it is presently structured, keep people

immature but every serious attempt to shift itIm avoiding the word educate deliberatelyto shift it

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philosophy. Or, when it is reformulated, its renegotiation occurs within the confines of a

particular tradition, e.g. pragmatism, liberal realism, or Marxism and it is almost always

negligent of, or dissociated from, the kindred notion of dystopia. The latter is often pre-

sented as the polemical other of utopia, that is, the inexorable and hard reality of failed

dreamworld. The importance of dystopia for education as a diagnostic but also critical toolof pathologies is, to my knowledge, totally absent. This neglect in the received view of the

complementary role of dystopia is accompanied by a failure to provide or imply a different

anthropology or, in other words, a different descriptive frame6 that would justify utopian

normativity. As a result, the normative force of utopia is attenuated through limitations

imposed along pragmatist and realist lines.7

In what follows, I sketch some general ideas for a rehabilitated utopia coupled with,

rather than in opposition to, the notion of dystopia.

Utopia and Dystopia

The term utopia describes a literary genre of concrete oneiric pictures of the good life as

well as abstract socio-political philosophical projects (Kumar 2003, pp. 6365), dream-

worlds imagined and dreamworlds attempted. However, the urge to utopia is not identical

with its articulation into a project (Bauman 2003, p. 11). From Bloch and Mannheim down

to Bauman, utopian urge is articulated as a universal impulse to measure life as it is by a

life as it might or should be. Thus the distinction is between utopian urge and its modernist

specification through redemptive projects. The latter took a vast number of forms but it can

be said to have sedimented into two basic routes to utopia. The one describes utopia interms of an abrupt transition between two discontinuous states. The other sees it in terms

of steady progress along a continuous path (Lassman 2003, p. 51). Although both have

been associated with revolutionary change or eschatology pertaining to various forms of

leftism, the linear historical evolutionary element is present in capitalism too, for which

utopia becomes a natural outcome of the dynamics of modern societal development, its

predictability and securitization.

Another distinction concerns the specification of vision: the notion of utopia unravelled

historically through subsequent shifts of emphasis from territoriality to finality (Bauman

2003). Whilst in Thomas More and in most other literary constructions of utopia deter-

minations are spatial, for the socio-political version of utopia-as-project, determinationsare temporal. True, there have also been instances of utopian thought such as the theo-

retical justification of British colonialism where the metaphysical capitalist finality meets

territoriality in conceptions of colonial additions as Promised Land, but, generally, the axis

of space was usually opposed to that of time. For obvious reasons, both (or their

6 Why such works on utopia and education, despite their merits and their being valuable in bringing the

topic back to the educational agenda, do not go far enough, is explained via their implicit anthropological

philosophical assumptions. Thus, elsewhere my concern is to examine the faulty descriptive frame that

blocks stronger revisions of the terms.7

The idea is that when utopian efforts aspire to something beyond the axes set by neo-pragmatism andsome version of realism, by some kind of anthropological necessity, dystopia will be the inescapable

conclusion. The term realistic utopia encountered in Rawls, McIntyre etc and the term pragmatist utopia

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combination) attracted fierce attacks for their stasis and homogeneity as well as for

tyrannical historicism. Objecting to the architectural and urbanistic (Bauman 2003, p. 14)

modern origins of territorial utopian determination and to the finality and teleology that led

to the totalitarianism of the past, a revival of utopian thought is rather to be preconditioned

on spatial and temporal indeterminacy. In Calvinos Invisible Cities (1997, p. 164), apassage that echoes Oscar Wildes (in Kumar, 1991, p. 95) view that a map of the world

that does not include utopia is not worth even glancing at reads as follows:

The Great Khans atlas contains also the maps of the promised lands visited in

thought but not yet discovered or founded: New Atlantis, Utopia, the City of the Sun,

Oceana, Tamoe, New Harmony, New Lanark, Icaria.

Kublai asked Marco: You, who go about exploring and who see signs, can tell me

toward which of these futures the favoring winds are driving us.

For these ports I could not draw a route on the map or set a date for the landing.

Thus, we may rescue utopia by arguing against the metaphysical stagnation of the locat-

ability of the perfect eternal and static city and by promoting the utopia that is critical not

only of the present but also of the closure of previous utopias (Geoghegan 2003, p. 152).

Indeed, it may be shown that finality is extrinsic to the demand for the common good,

obfuscatory and even detrimental to it. For we may argue, following Turner, that the

excesses of totalitarian regimes flowed not from a belief in universal happiness or truth, but

from a belief that history might be the ultimate legitimation for political practice (2003,

p. 44, fn 1).8

Does this relativization of time and space mean that we must lose all interest in those

ports for which we cannot draw a route on the map or set a date for the landing? A yesanswer privileges form over content: in Habermas, Honneth and Seels approaches (Cooke

2004, p. 416), formalism empties utopia from specific contents of the good life. However,

my answer to the above question is no, we must not lose our interest in the various

contents of utopias. We must turn to them not just because of their motivational role9 but

also because of their significance for discerning what would be worth pursuing. For, after

all, what more distinguishes the utopia of Mussolinis fascism (Burdett 2003) from various

teleological utopias, other than their contents, that is, their definition of the good? The last

section of this paper will clarify my position on a possible content of utopia, but here it is

important to see first where we stand after a post-metaphysical critique of utopia.

So, if the wrongheaded revolutionary confidence in the past emanated from an escha-tological and messianic conception of human history that is now implausible and obsolete,

is there space for a new utopian thought in postmodernism (Kumar 2003, p. 74)? Can one

portray the good society in the terms of irony, scepticism, playfulness, depthlessness,

ahistoricity, loss of faith in the future (Kumar 2003, p. 74)? My response is positive

regarding irony, playfulness and ahistoricity but negative regarding scepticism and

depthlessness; a new utopian thought can combine a loss of faith in the future with some

8

For instance, the idea that socialism would come when time was ripe was politically detrimental for thechances of the Austrian left to oppose Nazism. See Poppers The Open Society and its Enemies or, for a brief

account of this point see Magee (1985, pp. 1112).



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faith in the glimpse of the unexpected and the possibility to discern it. This is how Polo

responds to Khans question about utopia in Calvinos Invisible Cities:

At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous

landscape, a glint of lights in the fog, the dialogue of two passersby meeting in the

crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the

perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by inter-

vals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them. If I tell you that the

city toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scat-

tered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop. Perhaps

while we speak, it is rising, scattered, within the confines of your empire; you can

hunt for it, but only in the way I have said (1997, p. 164).

Human freedom as constant creative reaction to empirical reality precludes a totalizing and

non-revisable determination of utopian contents (Cooke 2004, p. 421). Along with it, the

finitude of human existence, the limits of knowledge and existential scope, preclude the

finality of the perfect time and the finalism of the perfect space. Utopia emerges only as a

possibility,10 felt through disconnected instances of the good embedded in everyday life

and in various social contexts. Of course, the most immediate and fashionable objection to

all this is the danger of dystopia. The original meaning of utopia, the good place that is no

place, is transformed into the good place that can be no place, and which, in seeking a

place, becomes its opposite, dystopia (Levitas 2003, p. 3).11

Already the great Khan was leafing through his atlas, over the maps of the cities that

menace in nightmares and maledictions: Enoch, Babylon, Yahooland, Butua, Brave

New World.He said: It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it

is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us (Calvino 1997, p.

164).

What is reflected here is the commonplace idea that utopia is doomed to turn into its

opposite. We see how dystopia becomes a weapon against radical imagination. Dystopias

have been deployed to stifle necessary and beneficial change by making people fearful of

such change, with the paradoxical outcome that the failure to change plunges society

further into the mire (Geoghegan 2003, p. 151).

However, things appear different if we add some nuance to the standard notion ofdystopia. There is the kind of dystopia that does precisely what has been described so far

and emanates from an anti-utopian outlook. Following Moylan (2000), I define the anti-

utopian as the belief that utopia is inherently dangerous and inevitably leads to totalitar-

ianism. The dystopia that derives from such anti-utopianism depicts ambitious experiments

that have gone wrong and chastises the hubristic character of utopian imagination. The

10 On utopia as a possibility, see, for instance, Lukacs early writings. Unlike his later ones, characterized

by the determinacy with which they predict utopia as a future possibility, his early writings do not claim that

utopia should be theorized as the outcome of an identifiable process of social change. Utopia is instead usedonly as a hermeneutic device, a ground upon which to criticize the dystopian present and a means by which

to stretch the critical imagination (Price 1999, p. 68). Like the early Lukacs, I believe that we should

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moral is, as Geoghegan puts it, leave the path of tradition or minimal reform and the gulag

beckons (2003, p. 152). However, there is also a dystopia that is not the opposite of utopia

and is termed critical dystopia, which contains, both in form and content, a destabilizing

element of dogged hope (ibid). According to Jameson, it is important to distinguish

between the anti-utopia that expresses the anti-revolutionary ideology for which utopiasinevitably lead to repression and dictatorship and the dystopia which is necessarily a

critique of tendencies at work in capitalism today (2004, p. 41). Dystopia, then, is not the

opposite of utopia, as is sometimes maintained; anti-utopia is the real opponent (Geog-

hegan, 2003, p. 153). In exaggerating the faults of the system, this kind of dystopia

revitalizes the urge for change, the yearning for a better life.

How are the redefined utopia and dystopia entangled? Just as everyday life stores

utopian moments, likewise it stores dystopian elements.12 This is how Polo responds to

Khans fears of dystopia.

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what isalready here, the inferno where we live everyday, that we form by being together.

There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the

inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky

and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who

and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give

them space (Calvino 1997, p. 165).

Fragmentary and discontinuous hope intersects with instances of lived nightmare. But

failure to perceive these dystopian instances normalizes them and blocks the effort to

pursue the utopian moment. Such uncritical normalization often derives from memories ofpast disheartening experiences when utopian energies produced a chaos and a terror that

was worse than the one they were unleashed to fight. I have argued that what remedies this

normalization of societal symptoms is the turning of dystopia not against utopian imagi-

nation but against the dominant reality. Thus, although I agree with much of what is being

written about the significance of utopian thought in education (Halpin 2001b, p. 110ff), I

believe that this significance could be more adequately theorized and defended through an

examination of the way in which dystopia and utopia intersect.

A discussion of dystopian elements in educational reality can function as a directive of

utopian thought toward alternative futures and away from existing pathologies mistaken as

inevitable. A discussion of the possible slippage of ambitious ideas for change into dys-topian distortions can function as a corrective of utopian thought that enlarges its

imaginative reach: utopian theory should deal not only with ideal contents but also with

their possible degeneration. Educational dystopia then becomes not a discourse of fore-

casting but of foreboding, mixed with tenacious hope.

Education and Dystopia: Mamets Oleanna

MametsOleanna

serves as an illustration of my argument about the role of dystopia as acritical device that unmasks educational pathologies13 and complements utopian



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educational discourse by giving it a new impetus. A revocation of the present becomes tied

with the invocation of a better future that has to be striven for.14 The title Oleanna refers to

a utopia where all goods are accessible and ready for consumption with no effort or energy

spent on acquiring them, but the play unfolds as depiction of an educational dystopia. John,

a professor of education, is in his office talking on the phone about the new house he isbuying, while Carol, a student, has been asked to his office to talk about her essay mark

being a fail. When they start talking, their communication is most of the time either

distorted or disrupted: she cannot understand the words he uses, they interrupt each other

and they get interrupted by a series of phone calls about his house. Carol tries to explain

apologetically that she did all she was told (she bought and read Johns book) but she just

cannot understand the material at all (p. 9). Contrasting the extra-mural with the academic

world, she says:

there are people out there. People who come here. To know something they didnt

know. Who came here. To be helped. To be helped. So someone would help them. Todo something. To know something. To get, what do they say? To get on in the

world. How can I do that if I dont, if I fail? But I dont understand. I dont

understand. I dont understand what anything means ... and I walk around. From

morning til night: with this one thought in my head. Im stupid (p. 12).

John takes an interest in the case, despite his initial hurried dismissal of her protests. Im

not your father (p. 9), he had said, but now he wants to deploy his good pedagogical tactics

to undo her negative self-image, to give her a new chance to learn and to enlighten her about

the vices of the educational system. Schooling makes students internalize failure and give in

to self-fulfilled prophecy; it is tyrannical and authoritarian. But Carol does not pay muchattention to his words. What she is really interested in is her grade (p. 24). He quickly gets

the distraction of the grade out of the way by granting her an A and offering to teach her

the material all over again (p. 25). Full of faith in the power of his progressive questioning of

the system, a questioning that has secured him the publication of a book, an imminent tenure

and a high salary, he sets out to convince Carol that he is on her side and that she can learn.

Im talking to you as Id talk to my son (p. 19), he now says. What we may perceive as

Carols inability owed to a long series of educational misfires is expected to be overcome in

a couple of sessions with John. In an interestingly subversive move, we see John attacking

the system and Carol becoming more confused and more defensive, since, to her, education

is the only road to success. Act One ends with a further failure of communication. Carol isabout to open up and talk about herself (p. 38): I always ... all my life ... I have never told

anyone this... (p. 38). But, that very moment, the phone rings. John picks it up; it is about a

surprise party in the new house to celebrate the tenure announcement and, as he has to go to

his party, the secret Carol was about to tell is forgotten.

In Act Two we are informed about Carols formal complaint against John of sexual

harassment and John now appears to have faith in the very system he was condemning. He

had talked previously to Carol about the bad committee that had put him to the test, that, in

his exact words, had people voting on me I wouldnt employ to wax my car (p. 23). Now he

is saying, the Tenure Committee will meet. This is the process, and agood

process. Underwhich the school has functioned for quite a long time. They will meet and hear your com-

plaintwhich you have the right to make; and they will dismiss it (p. 45). As the act unfolds,

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contrast to the dystopian world described in the play. That the actual Oleanna utopia failed

is an additional allusion to the hopeful beginnings of educational ideas going wrong in

practice. Yet, a further allusion of the title to an old folk song where utopia is exhausted in

commodities and facile unreflective gratification19 gives it a whole new dimension, since

the events of Oleanna are set against a background of getting on in the world wherestudents strive for easy achievement. Students are presented as lacking cultural capital,

being thus unable to decode the educational message. They desire to know but only for

external reasons, for obtaining degrees that will open for them the way to success. They

seek proof of knowledge, not learning itself, going after whatever is of social value and can

be cashed out as distinction.20

And they are prepared to seize the opportunities that life

offers and to utilize the system for self-serving purposes. In this respect, Carol is indeed an

achiever.

But the play depicts a dystopia because all the characters involved in it are complicit.

When the professor has control and power, he is distorted by the system; when the student

has it, she is distorted as well. The fault is not in the individual psychology of each

character, as it would have been in modernist realism, but, rather, in the system as a whole

(Sauer 2005, p. 6).21 The professor who appears at first glance progressive and dedicated

proves to be deeply conventional and motivated by a shallow educational fashion. This

character typifies how a realistic or pragmatist utopia presents a safe questioning of the

system; a protected anarchy that, by leaving true hierarchies unaffected, is shattered by

them. Education is expected to effect the appropriate societal change of values and con-

ceptions of the good life; yet education cannot just be the source of such transvaluation: it

has to be simultaneously its effect, since, without serious systemic societal change, edu-

cational redirection remains an empty letter.

22

Is any of this in mind when education isdesigned?

Educational Theory and Practice: The 2000 Curriculum

Our journey through texts takes us now to the 2000 British curriculum that came to replace

the 1988 curriculum. The 1988 curriculum was limited to bland truisms (White 2004, p.

2) but its successor is far more determinate. The 2000 curriculum is much clearer about its

values, aims and purposes, since those are exposed in a separate section constituting the

opening pages of the Handbookfor teachers on the National Curriculum post-2000 (ibid).Reading through, we do not encounter utopia or dystopia; I suspect that the authors of the

2000 text would give an anti-utopian response to the why of this omission. The word

change appears as a fact of economic, social and cultural reality with which we need to

be prepared to engage (ibid, p. 3); it is absent as a signifier of conscious and intentional

socio-political project. There is no account or characterization of society as a whole (in its

19 Like the Land of Cockaygne whose inhabitants, as Halpin explains (2001a, p. 302), want for nothing

materially and where there is super-abundance of food and drink and nobody works to obtain all this, the

song Ole Anna describes a materialist utopia.

20 Elsewhere, I attempt a more detailed discussion of the pedagogical issues involved in the play by

employing Bourdieu and also Adornos Theory of Halb-Bildung.21

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local and global manifestations); rather, a positive outlook on it seems to run through the

text, as students are encouraged to appreciate human achievement in varied fields. The

curriculum seems quite pleased with things as they are: there is no negative critique,

let alone dystopian accounts of reality, no mention of pathologies; and the word problems

comes up as something that able students qua critical thinkers should aspire to solve. Thus,the society that is almost absent from the text but to which the aims are ultimately

addressed seems to be, precisely through this lack of any reference to its condition, an

accomplished utopia.

However, there is margin for improvement: the pupils educated along the lines of this

curriculum will be enabled to make a difference for the better (ibid, p. 3). Now a realistic

or pragmatist utopia begins to rise from this text. The 2000 curriculums aims and purposes

present a picture of the kind of pupil that the school curriculum can ideally help to foster.

The ideal pupil is an informed, caring citizen of a liberal democratic society (White,

2004, p. 4).23 It is evident that, as Levitas argues, political anti-utopianism bolsters support

for liberal capitalism while concealing the utopian grounds of capitalism itself (2003, p. 3).

So, what does this repressed utopia consist of? We read that pupils should become

capable of contributing to the development of a just society (White, 2004, p. 4). Can a

politics of the future be achieved independently of a politics of the past? For instance,

could some awareness of the white Rhodesian colonial sponsoring of destructive counter-

movements in Mozambique, resulting in the displacement of 2 million people and the loss

of many lives (McClintock1994, p. 259), find a word in edgeways in a 2000 curriculum, a

millenium or maybe millenarian curriculum? No, there is no mention of any pending

historical debt to anyone, no ethical handling of memory, no redirection on grounds of

lessons from the past so that the past is not reenacted; only knowledge and understanding,amongst other things, of history and world culture. Of course, it will be no small feat that

the pupils will be challenging discrimination and stereotyping (p. 4), the only cases of

pathologies mentioned in the 2000 curriculum. Their vociferous, symbolic violence and

perhaps their tangible implications seem easily to be cured through political correctness24

and the obsession not to offend the other. In Oleanna, Carol destroys Johns and his wifes

life but she is sensitive to Johns politically incorrect way of addressing his wife: Dont

call your wife baby, Carol orders the professor.

Like in most other utopias, in repressed utopias too, all is about happiness. Happiness

and more happiness are desired now as they used to be in the bygone times of utopia-

writing; but happiness means now a different today rather than a more felicitous tomorrow ,as it did in the past (Bauman 2003, p. 23). It is a today of seized opportunity, achievement

and excellence. The aims of the 2000 curriculum read as follows. Aim 1: The school

curriculum should aim to provide opportunities for all pupils to learn and to achieve. Aim

2: The school curriculum should aim to promote pupils spiritual, moral, social and cultural

development and prepare all pupils for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences

of life (White 2004, pp. 34). The first aim of the 1988 curriculum, that is, to promote the

spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils at the school and of

society (White 2004, p. 2) remains intact in the 2000 curriculum, except for the last words:

of society. The meritocratic utopianism of egalitarian formalism and the utilitarianutopianism of earthly paradise (rendered as a dystopia in Oleanna) are expected to prepare

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the individual for what the future has in store, a future that is understood as a sequence of

disconnected moments of individual concernful dealings. And so happiness becomes a

private affair; and a matter for here and now. The happiness of others is no moreor

better be no morea condition of ones own felicity. Each moment of happiness is, after

all, lived through in a company that may still be around, but more likely will not be, whenthe next moment of happiness arrives (Bauman 2003, p. 23). The insistence of the 2000

curricular aims, practically, on pupils getting on in the world, reflects a privatization of

hope, as imagination and happiness are instructed to steer clear of societal harbours and on

no account cast there their anchors (Bauman 2003, p. 21).

Utopia and Ethics: Conclusion

Can a fragmentary and discontinuous hope suffuse educational practice with a new impulse

and guiding thread? Can we foster a public docta spes, an educated hope, through cognitive

transformation so that social agents are brought to see the pernicious effects of social

mechanisms and institutions (Cooke 2004, p. 418) and aspire to change them? I believe

that what is presupposed is not yet another utopian educational construction to contrast

with Oleanna, but, rather, an illustration of the direction of the societal change that con-

ditions educational change. Thus, utopian thinking becomes the ability to conjure up vivid

ethical pictures of a good society that would be possible only if certain hostile social

conditions were transformed (emphasis mine) (Cooke 2004, p. 419).

The pictorial aspect that is necessary for a vivid ethical approximation of the good

society can be enhanced by contrasting an ethical utopian construction with a dystopiandepiction of reality. A form of perfection negates a specific form of imperfection or, in Sir

Francis Bacons words, in order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be

present. Hermann Hesses short story Strange News from Another Star is a case in point.

In it, a dystopia and a utopia are contrasted as two distinct and parallel worlds. Written in

1919, this is a story about a utopian province of a star that suffers great loss in human life

because of an earthquake. The custom demands that the dead be decorated with flowers,

but most gardens were also destroyed. The people of the utopia send an adolescent to the

King of the star to ask for help. On the way to the King, the messenger is accidentally

diverted to another star, where he encounters destruction, misery and the amassed bodies of

killed soldiers and civilians. Shocked by a situation that he only knew from stories, hemeets the King of this dystopia and talks about the meaninglessness of war and antago-

nism. He then leaves, accomplishes his mission and returns home, where, after a while, the

visit to the dystopia seems more like a nightmare rather than a fact.

When we approach this story heuristically and not didactically, bypassing the dated

romanticist undertones of organicism, moralism, wholeness and unity, we find elements

that illustrate the content of utopia as a specific conception of the good. It has been noted in

a previous section that the latter requires some indeterminacy in order to give human

finitude its due but also some determinacy in order to motivate critique and action. The

utopia that Hesse depicts is indeterminate in many respects. Although it is a post-Enlightenment short story, it does not draw on the resources of the times, namely, science,

technology and a possible global order. Unlike other utopian fantasies, it is not about a land

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its utopia are ethical and the suffering in its dystopia is not subtle, e.g. the unpredicted

ramification of an inhuman perfection.25 On the contrary, it is obvious and ordinary: the

usual trials of humanity such as war, antagonism and destruction. There is no predictive or

planning emphasis, no teleological linearity but rather a comparative relational sense of

historical improvement: the utopian space is a symbol of a higher level humanity, one thathas overcome the past in which other spaces (otherwise co-temporal) live. In this way,

dystopian space is not just surpassed, a stirring memory of humanitys unhappy childhood,

but it is a prolonged past, a reenacted past, an uncanny entrapment in repetition. Remi-

niscent of Arcadia, Hesses utopia is not about eternal life but about a special way of

viewing mortality and the lived experience of the distinction between existential and

ethical evil, misfortune and cruelty. Reminiscent of Adornos statement in Minima Moralia

that there is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any

more (cf Levitas 2004b, p. 613), Hesses story is premised on a salient ethic of mutual

help, disinterestedness and avoidance of harm. Thus, the utopia that inspires it is not an

abstract metaphysical idea of all-round human perfection up to the transcendence of death,

but rather the inner-worldly product of the realization that human beings can do something

to relieve misery on this earth (Turner 2003, p. 32).

The ethical content of utopia and the precondition of all attempts at educational change,

the minimal determinacy required for judging various utopian aspirations, can be found in

the chasm that separates the utopian and the dystopian citizen and becomes evident from

their dialogue. In addressing the ruling elite of dystopia, the messenger states: a dream of

terror, so your life seems to me, and I do not know whether you are ruled by gods or

demons (Hesse 1976, p. 58). To the King of the dystopia who took his lived reality for

granted as unchangeable and natural, the child (messenger and symbol of utopia) seemeda paradox: in many ways this stranger seemed a cultivated, mature, and incredibly

enlightened spirit, but in others like a small child whom one must spare and not take quite

seriously (Hesse 1976, p. 58).

Finally, we notice in this story, just as in some other literary works, that utopia is

symbolized by the child, this young messenger who encountered the dystopia. Being a site

of promise, the plasticity of childhood places utopia at the heart of education. If society

ever realizes that the ultimate secret of seduction is a vision that transcends the mundane,

the enterprise of education to cultivate an uncompromising marvellous otherness

(Geoghegan 2003, p. 156) will be set on course. For, what is missing in much educational

theory and practice is ecstasy (Turner 2003, p. 41) and a glimpse of life as it might be. Ifin a depiction of a dystopian reality, in Oleanna, students desire most to get on in the

world, then, the proper space of utopia is the education of desire. This is not the same as

a moral education towards a given end: it is rather, to open a way to aspiration, to teach

desire to desire, to desire better, to desire more, and above all to desire in a different way

(Thompson, in Levitas 2003, p. 7).

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